Intellectual property, embodied in books, articles, films, music, television shows, and the like have become an increasingly important asset. Often, there is a complex bundle of intellectual property rights associated with a given intellectual property asset. For example, an owner of a film can divide and license portions of rights associated with the film. The owner can license the right to exhibit the film in different markets to different licensees. Further, the owner can grant the right to exhibit the film in different language to different licensees. In addition, the licenses can be granted for limited, specified times. Thus, there can be numerous intellectual property rights associated with even a single asset.
Unfortunately, intellectual property owners, such as movie studios, television production companies or record companies, have not been able to efficiently exploit their libraries of intellectual property. For example, using conventional intellectual property management systems, intellectual property owners lack an efficient way to fully market all the rights associated with their intellectual property. Conventional intellectual property rights management software packages are limited in their scope and functionality, and generally provide stand alone systems for correspondingly storing, buying and selling of intellectual property rights. Such rights management software often function more as spreadsheets or repositories of rights-related data and do not satisfactorily facilitate the distribution of intellectual property rights over a network, such as the Internet.